


Two Sides

by genarti



Series: old drabbles and ficlets [4]
Category: The Dark Is Rising
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-11-20
Updated: 2004-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 19:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in November 2004.  Short fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Sides

There are two sides to his life, and both are true.

In one, he is a boy, quiet and cheerful and mature for his age, the youngest of nine children. He has a round face and grey eyes and straight thick brown hair that always seems a bit too long, and he idolizes his eldest brother. He loves dogs and daffodils and biking along winding roads, and he sings every Sunday in the church choir.

In the other, he is as old as all humanity, and he watches the humans who move through their lives around him with a grave loving sympathy so all-encompassing it could almost be confused with uncaring. The lives of his sisters and brothers and parents of his other life are to him like silvery fish in a stream, darting bright and beautiful and beloved and gone in a moment, and never knowing the alien world of air beyond. In this life, he knows air and sea and earth and myth, knowledge gained not through studying but through gift and birthright.

But they are both true, these halves of himself, two sides of a spinning coin.

* * *

There are two sides to her life, and both are real.

In one, she is a shepherd's wife, warm and lovely and laughing. She has a generous smiling mouth and clever small hands, and in the evenings she listens to her husband play the harp. Sometimes she sings as he plays. There are white flowers in her name and music in her voice, and she bakes the best jam tarts in all of Twywn and beyond. She has no children, but she loves the neighbor's strange lonely child as if he were her own. She does not philosophize about the world, but is comfortable in her place in it.

In the other life, she looks at her dear husband and her friends and she sees a child's toys, blind and unthinking and moving on strings through a world too vast for them to ever comprehend. Soon they fall in untidy heaps and are forgotten utterly, and she laughs cold and high and cruel as the whistling east wind. In this side of herself, she knows that the light laughing farmwife's bright eyes and soft hair were coolly chosen to put her where she wants to be, on a certain farm at a certian time with just the right hearts in her lovely pale fingers' grasp. And hearts, she knows with light laughing malice, are for two things alone: winning, and breaking.

One side of her would insist that the other is only a pretty pantomime; one side would never think of the question. But, these two halves of her life, they are both real.


End file.
